it will.  Common consent and experience, until they are analysed, are fallacious tests for the seekers after positive truth.  The emotions may forbid us to ask our question; but in modern philosophy the emotions play no part as organs of discovery.  They are facts in themselves, and as such are of course of value; but they point to no facts beyond themselves.  That men loved God and felt his presence close to them proves nothing, to the positive thinker, as to God’s existence.  Nor will the mere emotion of reverence towards life necessarily go any farther towards proving that it deserves reverence.  It is distinctly asserted by the modern school that the right state in which to approach everything is a state of enlightened scepticism.  We are to consider everything doubtful, until it is proved certain, or unless, from its very nature, it is not possible to doubt it.

Nor is this all; for, apart from these modern canons, the question of life’s worth has, as a matter of fact, been always recognised as in a certain sense an open one.  The greatest intellects of the world, in all ages, have been at times inclined to doubt it.  And these times have not seemed to them times of blindness; but on the contrary, of specially clear insight.  Scales, as it were, have fallen from their eyes for a moment or two, and the beauty and worth of existence has appeared to them as but a deceiving show.  An entire book of the Hebrew Scriptures is devoted to a deliberate exposition of this philosophy.  In ’the most high and palmy state’ of Athens it was expressed fitfully also as the deepest wisdom of her most triumphant dramatist.[1] And in Shakspeare it appears so constantly, that it must evidently have had for him some directly personal meaning.

This view, however, even by most of those who have held it, has been felt to be really only a half-view in the guise of a whole one.  To Shakspeare, for instance, it was full of a profound terror.  It crushed, and appalled, and touched him; and there was not only implied in it that for us life does mean little, but that by some possibility it might have meant much.  Or else, if the pessimism has been more complete than this, it has probably been adopted as a kind of solemn affectation, or has else been lamented as a form of diseased melancholy.  It is a view that healthy intellects have hitherto declined to entertain.  Its advocates have been met with neglect, contempt, or castigation, not with arguments.  They have been pitied as insane, avoided as cynical, or passed over as frivolous.  And yet, but for one reason, to that whole European world whose progress we are now inheriting, this view would have seemed not only not untenable, but even obvious.  The emptiness of the things of this life, the incompleteness of even its highest pleasures, and their utter powerlessness to make us really happy, has been, at least for fifteen hundred years, a commonplace, both with saints and sages.  The conception that anything in this life